All of the patents, patent applications, technical papers and other references referenced below are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. Various patents, patent applications, patent publications and other published documents are discussed below as background of the invention. No admission is made that any or all of these references are prior art and indeed, it is contemplated that they may not be available as prior art when interpreting 35 U.S.C. §102 in consideration of the claims of the present application.
Automobile accidents are one of the most serious problems facing society today, both in terms of deaths and injuries, and in financial losses suffered as a result of accidents. The suffering caused by death or injury from such accidents is immense. The costs related to medical treatment, permanent injury to accident victims and the resulting loss of employment opportunities, and financial losses resulting from damage to property involved in such accidents are staggering. Providing the improved systems and methods to eventually eliminate these deaths, injuries and other losses deserves the highest priority. The increase in population and use of automobiles worldwide with the concomitant increased congestion on roadways makes development of systems for collision elimination even more urgent. While many advances have been made in vehicle safety, including, for example, the use of seatbelts, airbags and safer automobile structures, much room for improvement exists in automotive safety and accident prevention systems.
There are two major efforts underway that will significantly affect the design of automobiles and highways. The first is involved with preventing deaths and serious injuries from automobile accidents. The second involves the attempt to reduce the congestion on highways. In the first case, there are approximately forty two thousand (42,000) people killed each year in the United States by automobile accidents and another several hundred thousand are seriously injured. In the second case, hundreds of millions of man-hours are wasted every year by people stuck in traffic jams on the world's roadways. There have been many attempts to solve both of these problems; however, no single solution has been able to do so.
When a person begins a trip using an automobile, he or she first enters the vehicle and begins to drive, first out of the parking space and then typically onto a local or city road and then onto a highway. In leaving the parking space, he or she may be at risk from an impact of a vehicle traveling on the road. The driver must check his or her mirrors to avoid such an event and several electronic sensing systems have been proposed which would warn the driver that a collision is possible. Once on the local road, the driver is at risk of being impacted from the front, side and rear, and electronic sensors are under development to warn the driver of such possibilities. Similarly, the driver may run into a pedestrian, bicyclist, deer or other movable object and various sensors are under development that will warn the driver of these potential events. These various sensors include radar, optical, terahertz or other electromagnetic frequencies, infrared, ultrasonic, and a variety of other sensors, each of which attempts to solve a particular potential collision event. It is important to note that as yet, in none of these cases is there sufficient confidence in the decision that the control of the vehicle is taken away from the driver. Thus, action by the driver is still invariably required.
In some proposed future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) designs, hardware of various types is embedded into the highway and sensors which sense this hardware are placed onto the vehicle so that it can be accurately guided along a lane of the highway. In various other systems, cameras are used to track lane markings or other visual images to keep the vehicle in its lane. However, for successful ITS, additional information is needed by the driver, or the vehicle control system, to take into account weather, road conditions, congestion etc., which typically involves additional electronic hardware located on or associated with the highway as well as the vehicle. From this discussion, it is obvious that a significant number of new electronic systems are planned for installation onto automobiles. However, to date, no product has been proposed or designed which combines all of the requirements into a single electronic system. This is one of the intents of some embodiments of this invention.
The safe operation of a vehicle can be viewed as a process in the engineering sense. To achieve safe operation, first the process must be designed and then a vehicle control system must be designed to implement the process. The goal of a process designer is to design the process so that it does not fail. The fact that so many people are being seriously injured and killed in traffic accidents and the fact that so much time is being wasted in traffic congestion is proof that the current process is not working and requires a major redesign. To design this new process, the information required by the process must be identified, the source of that information determined and the process designed so that the sources of information can communicate effectively with the user of the information, which will most often be a vehicle control system. Finally, the process must have feedback that self-corrects the process when it is tending toward failure.
Although it is technologically feasible, it is probably socially unacceptable at this time for a vehicle safety system to totally control the vehicle. An underlying premise of embodiments of this invention, therefore, is that people will continue to operate their vehicle and control of the vehicle will only be seized by the control system when such an action is required to avoid an accident or when such control is needed for the orderly movement of vehicles through potentially congested areas on a roadway. When this happens, the vehicle operator will be notified and given the choice of exiting the road at the next opportunity. In some implementations, especially when this invention is first implemented on a trail basis, control will not be taken away from the vehicle operator but a warning system will alert the driver of a potential collision, road departure or other infraction.
Let us consider several scenarios and what information is required for the vehicle control process to prevent accidents. In one case, a driver is proceeding down a country road and falls asleep and the vehicle begins to leave the road, perhaps heading toward a tree. In this case, the control system would need to know that the vehicle was about to leave the road and for that, it must know the position of the vehicle relative to the road. One method of accomplishing this would be to place a wire down the center of the road and to place sensors within the vehicle to sense the position of the wire relative to the vehicle, or vice versa. An alternate approach would be for the vehicle to know exactly where it is on the surface of the earth and to also know exactly where the edge of the road is.
These approaches are fundamentally different because in the former solution every road in the world would require the placement of appropriate hardware as well as the maintenance of this hardware. This is obviously impractical. In the second case, the use of the global positioning satellite system (GPS), augmented by additional systems to be described below, will provide the vehicle control system with an accurate knowledge of its location. While it would be difficult to install and maintain hardware such as a wire down the center of the road for every road in the world, it is not difficult to survey every road and record the location of the edges, and the lanes for that matter, of each road. This information must then be made available through one or more of a variety of techniques to the vehicle control system.
Another case might be where a driver is proceeding down a road and decides to change lines while another vehicle is in the driver's blind spot. Various companies are developing radar, ultrasonic or optical sensors to warn the driver if the blind spot is occupied. The driver may or may not heed this warning, perhaps due to an excessive false alarm rate, or he or she may have become incapacitated, or the system may fail to detect a vehicle in the blind spot and thus the system will fail.
Consider an alternative technology where again each vehicle knows precisely where it is located on the earth surface and additionally can communicate this information to all other vehicles within a certain potential danger zone relative to the vehicle. Now, when the driver begins to change lanes, his or her vehicle control system knows that there is another vehicle in the blind spot and therefore will either warn the driver or else prevent him or her from changing lanes thereby avoiding the accident.
Similarly, if a vehicle is approaching a stop sign, other traffic marker or red traffic light and the operator fails to bring the vehicle to a stop, if the existence of this traffic light and its state (red in this example) or stop sign has been made available to the vehicle control system, the system can warn the driver or seize control of the vehicle to stop the vehicle and prevent a potential accident. Additionally, if an operator of the vehicle decides to proceed across an intersection without seeing an oncoming vehicle, the control system will once again know the existence and location and perhaps velocity of the oncoming vehicle and warn or prevent the operator from proceeding across the intersection.
Consider another example where water on the surface of a road is beginning to freeze. Probably the best way that a vehicle control system can know that the road is about to become slippery, and therefore that the maximum vehicle speed must be significantly reduced, is to get information from some external source. This source can be sensors located on the highway that are capable of determining this condition and transmitting it to the vehicle. Alternately, the probability of icing occurring can be determined analytically from meteorological data and a historical knowledge of the roadway and communicated to the vehicle over a LEO or GEO satellite system, the Internet or an FM sub-carrier or other means. A combination of these systems can also be used.
Studies have shown that a combination of meteorological and historic data can accurately predict that a particular place on the highway will become covered with ice. This information can be provided to properly equipped vehicles so that the vehicle knows to anticipate slippery roads. For those roads that are treated with salt to eliminate frozen areas, the meteorological and historical data will not be sufficient. Numerous systems are available today that permit properly equipped vehicles to measure the coefficient of friction between the vehicle's tires and the road. It is contemplated that perhaps police or other public vehicles will be equipped with such a friction coefficient measuring apparatus and can serve as probes for those roadways that have been treated with salt. Information from these probe vehicles will be fed into the information system that will then be made available to control speed limits in those areas.
Countless other examples exist; however, from those provided above it can be seen that for the vehicle control system to function without error, certain types of information must be accurately provided. These include information permitting the vehicle to determine its absolute location and means for vehicles near each other to communicate this location information to each other. Additionally, map information that accurately provides boundary and lane information of the road must be available. Also, critical weather or road-condition information is necessary. The road location information need only be generated once and changed whenever the road geometry is altered. This information can be provided to the vehicle through a variety of techniques including prerecorded media such as CD-ROM or DVD disks or through communications from transmitters located in proximity to the vehicle, satellites, radio and cellular phones.
Consider now the case of the congested highway. Many roads in the world are congested and are located in areas where the cost of new road construction is prohibitive or such construction is environmentally unacceptable. It has been reported that an accident on such a highway typically ties up traffic for a period of approximately four times the time period required to clear the accident. Thus, by eliminating accidents, a substantial improvement of the congested highway problem is obtained. This of course is insufficient. On such highways, each vehicle travels with a different spacing, frequently at different speeds and in the wrong lanes. If the proper spacing of the vehicles could be maintained, and if the risk of an accident could be substantially eliminated, vehicles under automatic control could travel at substantially higher velocities and in a more densely packed configuration thereby substantially improving the flow rate of vehicles on the highway by as much as a factor of 3 to 4 times. This not only will reduce congestion but also improve air pollution. Once again, if each vehicle knows exactly where it is located, can communicate its location to surrounding vehicles and knows precisely where the road is located, then the control system in each vehicle has sufficient information to accomplish this goal.
Again, an intention of the system and process described here is to totally eliminate automobile accidents as well as reduce highway congestion. This process is to be designed to have no defective decisions. The process employs information from a variety of sources and utilizes that information to prevent accidents and to permit the maximum vehicle throughput on highways.
The information listed above is still insufficient. The geometry of a road or highway can be determined once and for all, until erosion or construction alters the road. Properly equipped vehicles can know their location and transmit that information to other properly equipped vehicles. There remains a variety of objects whose location is not fixed, which have no transmitters and which can cause accidents. These objects include broken down vehicles, animals such as deer which wander onto highways, pedestrians, bicycles, objects which fall off of trucks, and especially other vehicles which are not equipped with location determining systems and transmitters for transmitting that information to other vehicles. Part of this problem can be solved for congested highways by restricting access to these highways to vehicles that are properly equipped. Also, these highways are typically in urban areas and access by animals can be effectively eliminated. Heavy fines can be imposed on vehicles that drop objects onto the highway. Finally, since every vehicle and vehicle operator becomes part of the process, each such vehicle and operator becomes a potential source of information to help prevent catastrophic results. Thus, each vehicle should also be equipped with a system of essentially stopping the process in an emergency. Such a system could be triggered by vehicle sensors detecting a problem or by the operator strongly applying the brakes, rapidly turning the steering wheel or by activating a manual switch when the operator observes a critical situation but is not himself in immediate danger. An example of the latter case is where a driver witnesses a box falling off of a truck in an adjacent lane.
To solve the remaining problems, therefore, each vehicle should also be equipped with an anticipatory collision sensing system, or collision forecasting system, which is capable of identifying or predicting and reacting to a pending accident. As the number of vehicles equipped with the control system increases, the need for the collision forecasting system will diminish.
Once again, the operator will continue to control his vehicle provided he or she remains within certain constraints. These constraints are like a corridor. As long as the operator maintains his vehicle within this allowed corridor, he or she can operate that vehicle without interference from the control system. That corridor may include the entire width of the highway when no other vehicles are present or it may be restricted to all eastbound lanes, for example. In still other cases, that corridor may be restricted to a single line and additionally, the operator may be required to keep his vehicle within a certain spacing tolerance from the preceding vehicle. If a vehicle operator wishes to exit a congested highway, he could operate his turn signal that would inform the control system of this desire and permit the vehicle to safely exit from the highway. It can also inform other adjacent vehicles of the operator's intent, which could then automatically cause those vehicles to provide space for lane changing, for example. The highway control system is thus a network of individual vehicle control systems rather than a single highway resident computer system.
Considering now the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) policy, in the DOT FY 2000 Budget in Brief Secretary Rodney Slater states that “Historic levels of federal transportation investment . . . are proposed in the FY 2000 budget.” Later, Secretary Slater states that “Transportation safety is the number one priority.” DOT has estimated that $165 billion per year are lost in fatalities and injuries on U.S. roadways. Another $50 billion are lost in wasted time of people on congested highways. Presented herein is a plan to eliminate fatalities and injuries and to substantially reduce congestion. The total cost of implementing this plan is minuscule compared to the numbers stated above. This plan has been named the “Road to Zero Fatalities™”, or RtZF™ for short.
The DOT Performance Plan FY 2000, Strategic Goal: Safety, states that “The FY 2000 budget process proposes over $3.4 billion for direct safety programs to meet this challenge.” The challenge is to “Promote the public health and safety by working toward the elimination of traffic related deaths, injuries and property damage”. The goal of the RtZF™, as described below and which is a part of the present invention, is the same and herein a plan is presented for accomplishing this goal. The remainder of the DOT discussion centers around wishful thinking to reduce the number of transportation related deaths, injuries, etc. However, the statistics presented show that in spite of this goal, the number of deaths is now increasing. As discussed below, this is the result of a failed process.
Reading through the remainder of the DOT Performance Plan FY 2000, one is impressed by the billions of dollars that are being spent to solve the highway safety problem coupled with the enormous improvement that has been made until the last few years. It can also be observed that the increase in benefits from these expenditures has now disappeared. For example, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled fell from 5.5 to 1.7 in the period from the mid-1960s to 1994. But this decrease has now substantially stopped! This is an example of the law of diminishing returns and signals the need to take a totally new approach to solving this problem.
The U.S. Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) policy states that significant funds have been spent on demonstrating various ITS technologies. It is now time for implementation. With over 40,000 fatalities and almost four million people being injured every year on US roadways, it is certainly time to take affirmative action to stop this slaughter. The time for studies and demonstrations is past. However, the deployment of technologies that are inconsistent with the eventual solution of the problem will only delay implementation of the proper systems and thereby result in more deaths and injuries.
A primary goal of the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative was to reduce highway related fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled from 1.7 in 1996 to 1.6 in 2000. Of course, the number of fatalities may still increase due to increased road use. If this reduction in fatalities comes about due to slower travel speeds, because of greater congestion, then has anything really been accomplished? Similar comments apply to the goal of reducing the rate of injury per 100 million vehicle miles from 141 in 1996 to 128 in 2000. An alternate goal, as described herein, is to have the technology implemented on all new vehicles by the year 2010 that will eventually eliminate all fatalities and injuries. As an intermediate milestone, it is proposed to have the technology implemented on all new vehicles by 2007 to reduce or eliminate fatalities caused by road departure, center (yellow) line crossing, stop sign infraction, rear end and excessive speed accidents. Inventions described herein will explain how these are goals can be attained.
In the IVI Investment Strategy, Critical Technology Elements And Activities of the DOT, it says “The IVI will continue to expand these efforts particularly in areas such as human factors, sensor performance, modeling and driver acceptance”. An alternate, more effective, concentration for investments would be to facilitate the deployment of those technologies that will reduce and eventually eliminate highway fatalities. Driver acceptance and human factors will be discussed below. Too much time and resources have already been devoted to these areas. Modeling can be extremely valuable and sensor performance is in a general sense a key to eliminating fatalities.
On Jul. 15, 1998, the IVI light vehicle steering committee met and recommended that the IVI program should be conducted as a government industry partnership like the PNGV. This is believed to be quite wrong and it is believed that the IVI should now move vigorously toward the deployment of proven technology.
The final recommendations of the committee was “In the next five years, the IVI program should be judged on addressing selected impediments preventing deployment, not on the effect of IVI services on accident rates.” This is believed to be a mistake. The emphasis for the next five years should be to deploy proven technologies and to start down the Road to Zero Fatalities™. Five years from now technology should be deployed on production vehicles sold to the public that have a significant effect toward reducing fatalities and injuries.
As described in the paper “Preview Based Control of A Tractor Trailer Using DGPS For Preventing Road Departure Accidents” the basis of the technology proposed has been demonstrated.